Combat = Time

When it didn't work

I remember the moment pretty clearly: Noah, Matt and I were playing and while I don't recall what Matt was doing, Noah had a RUG Temur Battle Rage/Become Immense thing happening and I went in one turn from 20 to 6 life.

I was dead the next turn.

All I would think of was: I need a way to get more time.

So how the heck can I reliably do that? Card draw in Green, the dominant color, is too slow. Tweaking the mana base so I can use Blue seems very unwise. What to do?

Arachnogenesis. That's right, I'm taking the best Fog ever out for a spin. As a function of time, Arachnogenesis should provide me with two full turns of things to do and maybe that's all that I need. I certainly need to do something: the answers aren't coming and it's getting frustrating.

When it did!

Hell, I was considering Worldly Counsel for a bit. But the answer has to be in green or else I run the risk of having dead cards in hand and with a combo deck like this using redundancy to give it consistency, dead cards are already a problem.

In games against Caitlin and Fuz, the Spider Surprise did what I hoped; gave me minimum two turns to work things out. In one game that wasn't enough-Vigor on board blunts what Arachnogenesis wants to do-but in my other games the spiders did great work.

In the case of most aggro decks, the spiders can take out their most potent threat, enabling a decent stalemate, or against others, blunting the "all in" attack and giving me more than a turn to get things going.

I would still prefer more card draw, or another Show & Tell but for now, I think I'm in pretty good shape.